Prosecutorial Misconduct Implicated in 550 Death Penalty Reversals, Exonerations
The Death Penalty Information Center has discovered rampant prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty prosecutions, finding more than 550 prosecutorial misconduct reversals and exonerations in capital cases in the past half-century.
Landwebs
An analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) has discovered rampant prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty prosecutions, finding more than 550 prosecutorial misconduct reversals and exonerations in capital cases, amounting to roughly 5.6 percent of all death sentences imposed in the United States in the past half-century, according to a recent press release.
“The data on wrongful convictions has long shown that prosecutorial misconduct is a significant source of injustice in the criminal legal system,” DPIC executive director Robert Dunham said. “But this research documents that what some judges have described as an ‘epidemic’ of misconduct is even more pervasive than we had imagined.”
The list does not include the even more numerous cases in which courts found that prosecutors had committed misconduct but excused it on grounds of supposed immateriality or harmless error or the misconduct reversals in cases in which capital charges had been pursued but defendants were convicted of lesser charges or sentenced to life or less.
DPIC, a nonprofit advocacy group opposed to the death penalty, found the most common types of misconduct were withholding favorable evidence (implicated in 35 percent of the reversed convictions or sentences) and improper argument (present in 33 percent of reversed sentences). 16 percent of the misconduct reversals or exonerations involved more than one category of misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct was present in 121 cases that led to a death-row exoneration.
The misconduct often spanned multiple trial proceedings, including the case of Mississippi death-row survivor Curtis Flowers, who had four different convictions and death sentences overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct before he eventually was exonerated.
The full report can be downloaded here.
